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We will have to examine this Nature, the Intellectual, which
our reasoning identifies as the authentically existent and the
veritable essential: but first we must take another path and make
certain that such a principle does necessarily exist.
Perhaps it is ridiculous to set out enquiring whether an
Intellectual-Principle has place in the total of being: but there
may be some to hesitate even as to this and certainly there will
be the question whether it is as we describe it, whether it is a
separate existence, whether it actually is the real beings,
whether it is the seat of the Ideas; to this we now address
ourselves.
All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be
compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is
simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood,
is not realized out of these materials until the appropriate
craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the
particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural
forms of being; those including several constituents, compound
bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and
the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example,
into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements.
Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping
principle- since the Matter of the elements is of itself
shapeless- you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and
you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or
whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter
and something else- the Intellectual-Principle in it-
representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on
the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape.
Applying the same method to the total of things, here too we
discover the Intellectual-Principle and this we set down as
veritably the maker and creator of the All. The underly has
adopted, we see, certain shapes by which it becomes fire, water,
air, earth; and these shapes have been imposed upon it by
something else. This other is Soul which, hovering over the Four
[the elements], imparts the pattern of the Kosmos, the Ideas for
which it has itself received from the Intellectual-Principle as
the soul or mind of the craftsman draws upon his craft for the
plan of his work.
The Intellectual-Principle is in one phase the Form of the soul,
its shape; in another phase it is the giver of the shape- the
sculptor, possessing inherently what is given- imparting to soul
nearly the authentic reality while what body receives is but
image and imitation.
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